Op-Ed | Is It Time To Reconsider Some Place Names In The Great Smokies?

Op-Ed | A Closer Look At Some Prominent Place Names In Great Smokies

Is There Need To Change Some?

By Ben Anderson 

Buildings, statues, monuments, parks, roads – many of their names (or structures) have been removed or subject to intense scrutiny in recent years, even before the racial-justice movement gained greater urgency in 2020. In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the long-ago naming of some prominent natural landmarks, as opposed to edifices, could in turn be questioned because of individuals’ personal histories, beliefs or affiliations. 

Let’s look at three such Smokies landmarks – two of which are especially well known and inherently controversial – and the men for whom they are named. The stigma of these place names isn’t dimmed by their predating the Lost Cause mythology/Jim Crow reality that spurred the lionization of scores of Confederates and segregationists well beyond the Smokies. 

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Although likely unfamiliar to most park visitors, Thomas Divide is a major part of the Smokies’ unruly terrain. In fact, if the North Carolina side of the park has a geographic heart and soul, perhaps it can be found in this particular landform. A long, crescent-shaped ridge that extends from near Newfound Gap to the Deep Creek area just north of Bryson City, North Carolina, Thomas Divide loftily separates the watersheds of two lovely streams that eventually flow into the Tuckasegee River just outside the park: Deep Creek and the Oconaluftee River. Thomas Divide Trail, one of the park’s longer paths at nearly 14 miles, traces most of the divide’s crest that rises to roughly a mile high and dips to just over 2,000 feet elevation. 

The divide is named for William H. Thomas, one of the most compelling figures in the annals of Western North Carolina. Thomas, the adopted white son of Cherokee Chief Yonaguska (Drowning Bear), was chosen by a dying Yonaguska in 1839 to become chief himself of the remnant Quallatown Cherokees in North Carolina after the merciless Trail of Tears removal to the Oklahoma Territory. He also was the inspiration for the protagonist in Charles Frazier’s novel Thirteen Moons.

Nicknamed “Wil-Usdi” or “Little Will” because of his small stature, Thomas was heavily engaged in acquiring land for what would become the nucleus of the 56,000-acre land trust known today as the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. During the Civil War he commanded Thomas’ Legion of Indians and Highlanders, who were attacked and defeated by Union forces at the Battle of Deep Creek in February 1864. A company of Thomas’ men routed Union soldiers in nearby Waynesville, North Carolina, in May 1865, but only after the war was essentially over. Lost cause, indeed. And yes, this champion of the Confederacy as well as of the Cherokee also owned a significant number of slaves over the years. It’s safe to say that William Thomas’ legacy is complicated.

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Many would argue that Mount Le Conte is the most spectacular mountain in the Southern Appalachians, ranking ahead of worthy contenders such as North Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain, highest peak in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In addition to its soaring elevation of 6,593 feet, Le Conte’s mass and altitude rising about 5,000 feet above nearby Gatlinburg, Tennesse, make it an immensely popular destination for both overnight excursions and long day trips. There’s no real view from High Top, Le Conte’s forested highest point, but sunrises from Myrtle Point and sunsets from Cliff Top rate as world class. In fact, the entire breadth of the prodigious mountain, with its rare spruce-fir forest ecosystem, is something of a high-elevation Shangri-la.   

There’s some lingering debate over whether Mount Le Conte is named for geologist Joseph LeConte or his physicist brother, John. The latter choice is more likely, as John helped geologist Samuel Buckley determine the mountain’s approximate elevation in the 1850s. In any case, the brothers did spell LeConte as one word, meaning that the rustic, hike-in LeConte Lodge near the mountain’s summit has it right. Not in dispute is the fact that the brothers owned a large number of slaves after inheriting a plantation in southeast Georgia. They also came to support secession and the Confederacy. In the late 19th century, long after he and his brother had left the South to accept positions at Cal Berkeley (John, in fact, would become the university’s president), Joseph LeConte wrote a book titled The Race Problem in the South that strongly advocated continued segregation of the races. Yet to this day, the surname – as two words – persists on the most storied mountain in the Smokies.

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Clingmans Dome, at 6,643 feet elevation the highest point in the Smokies and along the entire Appalachian Trail, was named for North Carolinian Thomas L. Clingman shortly before the Civil War. Formerly known as Smoky Dome or Old Smoky, the mountain was renamed by geographer Arnold Guyot, who later measured the dome’s altitude at a nearly accurate 6,660 feet despite having to rely on relatively crude instruments.

Clingman, a U.S. senator before becoming a Confederate brigadier general in the Civil War, had organized an expedition in 1858 to explore the mountain and determine its elevation. Guyot agreed with the self-affected Clingman that the mountain should thus be named after Clingman rather than Samuel Buckley, a member of the 1858 expedition who calculated the mountain’s elevation at 6,755 feet. (Buckley instead got what remains an essentially obscure consolation prize, the 6,580-foot-high Mount Buckley just west of Clingmans Dome; the Smokies’ second highest mountain, with an elevation of 6,621 feet, is named Mount Guyot.)

Unlike that of William Thomas, Thomas Clingman’s legacy from his public life isn’t particularly complicated. Not only did Clingman serve as a Confederate officer in the Civil War, he also was a staunch member of the notorious Fire-Eaters, pro-slavery extremists who strongly favored secession. As a member of Congress, Clingman also advocated violence as a possible option in opposing the Compromise of 1850. Today his surname endures most prominently as the place name of the third highest peak east of the Mississippi River.

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What names might reasonably be considered if these three place names were to be removed? Here are three possibilities, each the name of a 20th-century Tennessean though certainly many North Carolinians could be considered, especially in the case of Thomas Divide:

• Jim Thompson of Knoxville was an accomplished photographer whose images, like those of George Masa of North Carolina, were instrumental in the 1920s campaign to establish a national park in the Great Smoky Mountains. Stunning photos by Thompson, a founding member of the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club, were shown to Congressional members of a national park exploratory committee. Perhaps Thomas Divide, whose upper reaches are not far from the park’s Masa Knob along the Appalachian Trail, would be more aptly known as Thompson Divide. 
• Arthur Stupka was the Smokies park’s first chief naturalist, serving in that position for 25 years after moving south from Acadia National Park. His work in chronicling the remarkable diversity of flora and fauna in the Smokies is legendary. Because of Stupka’s enduring contributions in creating awareness and understanding of the park’s habitats and biodiversity, Mount Stupka could rightly be considered as a new name for the iconic Mount Le Conte.
• In regard to Clingmans Dome, a strong case could be made for renaming it Davis Dome, after Anne Davis of Knoxville. Upon returning to Tennessee from a trip to Yellowstone National Park in 1923, she famously asked her husband, Willis P. Davis, “Why should there be national parks in the West and only one tiny one in the East?” At the time Lafayette National Park, established in Maine in 1919 and later renamed Acadia, was the East’s lone national park. Her husband, an influential Knoxville businessman who also would become a strong proponent of a Smokies park, didn’t have an answer.

But Anne Davis was much more than a dreamer; she was also a doer. After becoming the third woman elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives, serving a single term in the mid-1920s, she successfully sponsored seemingly quixotic legislation calling for the state to purchase more than 76,000 acres of Smokies land that had been logged by Little River Lumber Co. Her determined push to have Tennessee purchase Little River’s vast holdings initiated land acquisition even before Congress authorized a Smokies park in 1926, leading to the park’s eventual establishment in 1934. Although a little-known ridge in the park already is named for Anne Davis, a considerably more prominent place name would seem to be in order for the woman generally regarded as the “Founding Mother” of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

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None of the three landmarks noted above has a monument similar to the park’s Rockefeller Memorial at Newfound Gap honoring Laura Spelman Rockefeller. (Her son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., made a critical gift of $5 million in the late 1920s that enabled the park to be established.) There are thus no park memorials to consider removing. It’s also unlikely that many of the 12+ million visitors who pour into the park each year know very much, if anything, about Clingman, Thomas, or the LeContes. Yet their names, with their dubious histories, denote some of the most renowned places in the nation’s most visited national park. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider them, especially the place names Clingman and LeConte.

Ben Anderson is the author of Smokies Chronicle: A Year of Hiking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Blairpub.com). He has been a backcountry volunteer for the national park for more than 25 years and lives in North Carolina.